[jukofyork]

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If the players were technically knowledgeable and sufficiently motivated it might be feasible.

The main problem is obviously guaranteeing that a non-hacked version of the software is running on the server. This means each client would need some secure way of validating the internals of the software it's connecting to.

You're a much smarter guy than me so maybe you have some ideas. I can't think of any way to query a system to guarantee the integrity of its parts, when the server owner has complete control over it and access to the source code.

I can't think of any existing code that does this. There's a validation protocol in a p2p app that I'm not allowed to mention, that's required for it to connect to a certain third party network, but it's hackable.

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Ignoring all the extra complexities of poker then a much simpler question would be:

Q) Is it possible to play an "uncheatable" game of Roshambo (rock, paper, scissors) using a P2P topology (ie: no central server)?

Perhaps this can be accomplished using some kind of public key encryption system, but I'm not 100% sure and haven't thought about it carefully yet. If it is possible then the next question is:

Q) Is it possible to play an "uncheatable" game of Roshambo using a P2P topology where each player's choices are randomly selected and either the randomness is checked/enforced somehow or it is impossible for one player to positively effect the outcome by choosing their number(s) manually.

Even if if (1) is possible, then I wonder if (2) will just end up being some kind of "Byzantines General Problem" and end up intractable... If P2P Roshambo is impossible to secure then so will P2P poker.

Juk [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]